I came across two articles today—one looking backward, one looking forward—that illustrate the incredible progress we’re making in power management and battery life for our electronic devices. This is important because battery technology isn’t making tremendous strides (although there have been a few bright spots) so to solve the problem of iPhones that can’t make it through the day on a single charge or laptops that can’t make it through an airplane flight from New York to San Francisco we need to look at the problem from the other end. We need to find ways to draw less power from the batteries that we already have.
Remember when the MacBook Air came out and we were all swooning at the 7 hour battery life? If you haven’t been paying attention or are still relatively young, that might seems like only major improvement for some time. But as this article in The Atlantic points out, a computer from 20 years ago that was identical to the MacBook Air but had the power efficiency of the typical 1991 computer would drain the Air’s battery in 2.5 seconds. Of course, part of that is that today’s chips are more powerful as well as more efficient but the point stands: we’ve made tremendous strides in making our devices use available power more efficiently.
That’s an example of something else that’s been in the (tech) news a lot lately: Koomey’s Law. Koomey’s Law is a sort of analog to Moore’s Law. It states that for the last 60 years the electrical efficiency of computation has doubled every 18 months.
Where are we headed in the near future? Over at Cult of Mac there is an interesting article saying that new Intel chips could let future MacBooks have practically unlimited battery life. That’s because the new chips are so efficient that an on-board solar cell could keep the battery charged virtually forever. Of course, Apple hasn’t announced such a product and the new chips are still a couple of years out but it does underline the amazing advances we’re making. The Cult of Mac article is very interesting and I urge you to read it. Soon we’ll be shaking our heads in pity for those poor people from 2011 who had MacBooks that could only go 7 hours between charges.
Now if we could only build better batteries…